As another former career intelligence officer, I found the Signal conversation infuriating in itself. It’s the worst kind of breach of operational security. But even more infuriating has been the Administration’s response to try to dissemble and downplay the incident while clearly signaling that they have zero interest to undertake a serious review either to hold individuals accountable or learn from the incident to try to avoid similar future incidents like this.

As you point out, our adversaries spend billions to obtain this kind of information, as do we. The reckless, arrogant, and willfully ignorant approach the current national security leadership group displayed in this instance bodes poorly for maintaining the security of sensitive US operations, sources and methods going forward.

Meanwhile, we have presented a soft and lucrative collection target for the intelligence agencies in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and everywhere else that would seek to gain information advantage over the U.S. At some point, the U.S. will pay a price for this and we may be very unhappy about the cost.